There's a LOT of good information there that potentially relates to Xbox not just being another Windows device with a console UI, but a Windows devices that is specifically engineered to accelerate Dx12 rendering in a way that PCs cannot due to generalized hardware versus built to purpose specialized hardware (when combined with the previous Digital Foundry articles).
It also speaks towards game development focused on scalable graphics and scalable engines which can handle a variety of different hardware configurations. IMO, this speaks towards a high likelihood of a rolling generations style of console hardware design rather than hard generational breaks.
In other words, you design your game to the highest hardware spec available at any given moment (PC was used as the example highest hardware spec) and then you make sure that the engine is scalable down from there. So all of your assets are authored for the highest hardware specification.
If we combine this with the previous articles from Digital Foundry, especially the one about heavy profiling of games to determine the final hardware specifications as well as to determine what customizations would be used for the CPU and GPU, I get the feeling that for Microsoft generational console changes will revolve around taking titles that pushes the hardware in ways that would make a current console less efficient than when how it was at the start of the generation (IE - new rendering techniques coming into use) and massively profiling them to ensure that the newest generation of console will be able to handle those games better and more efficiently (beyond just an overall hardware power increase) than the current console. This would include things like developers using new hardware capabilities either on PC or competing consoles and seeing about incorporating those into the specialized console hardware.
In other words. PC hardware (CPU/GPU) will once again become the proving grounds for what is possible for a future console by developing first on PC and using new GPU features. Then you scale those back to what the Xbox console can handle. Then you profile the PC version of that game with the new GPU features to determine the CPU/GPU features of next generation of console.
It may not play out like that. But that's the feeling I get from reading about how Turn 10 and The Coalition (and thus Microsoft) approached developing games in preparation of Project Scorpio. Then combining that with how Project Scorpio is designed around accelerating the rendering of Dx12 in ways that a PC cannot or currently does not (for example, moving Dx12 draw calls into the command processor of the GPU as much as possible) as well as specific hardware changes to the GPU in order to target game rendering versus general Windows graphics rendering which those GPUs are designed for.
TL: DR - Microsoft may move towards targeting the most powerful hardware on PC for game development. Then you scale that down to whatever the current Xbox console is at the time for the console version. Then, hypothetically, for a new generation you heavily profile those first party games running on the highest spec PC version to determine the hardware configuration of the next "generation" of console. They'd also want to profile 3rd party games running on console and PC if they are different, IE not UWP games.
It'd be taking the reverse approach to how current PC development supports lower hardware tiers. IE - instead of targeting the older hardware and scaling up, you target the highest hardware and scale down.
Regards,
SB
